What Are The 5 Love Languages? Everything You Need To Know

The five love languages are five different ways of expressing and receiving love: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. Not everyone communicates love in the same way, and likewise, people have different ways they prefer to receive love. The concept of love languages was developed by Gary Chapman, Ph.D., in his book The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts, where he describes these five unique styles of communicating love, categories he distilled from his experience in marriage counseling and linguistics. 

"We all may relate to most of these languages, but each of us has one that speaks to us the most," marriage and family therapist Sunny Motamedi, Psy.D., tells mbg. "Discovering you and your partner's primary love language and speaking that language regularly may [create] a better understanding of each other's needs and support each other's growth."

People with words of affirmation as a love language value verbal acknowledgments of affection, including frequent "I love you's," compliments, words of appreciation, verbal encouragement, and often frequent digital communication like texting and social media engagement.

People whose love language is quality time feel the most adored when their partner actively wants to spend time with them and is always down to hang out. They particularly love when active listening, eye contact, and full presence are prioritized hallmarks in the relationship. 

If your love language is acts of service, you value when your partner goes out of their way to make your life easier. It's things like bringing you soup when you're sick, making your coffee for you in the morning, or picking up your dry cleaning for you when you've had a busy day at work.

Gifts is a pretty straightforward love language: You feel loved when people give you "visual symbols of love," as Chapman calls it. It's not about the monetary value but the symbolic thought behind the item. People with this style recognize and value the gift-giving process: the careful reflection, the deliberate choosing of the object to represent the relationship, and the emotional benefits from receiving the present. 

People with physical touch as their love language feel loved when they receive physical signs of affection, including kissing, holding hands, cuddling on the couch, and sex. Physical intimacy and touch can be incredibly affirming and serve as a powerful emotional connector for people with this love language. The roots go back to our childhood, Motamedi notes, some people only felt deep affection and love by their parents when they were held, kissed, or touched. 

To find your type, read the following statements and mark the ones that deeply resonate with you, or head over to take the 5 love languages test.

Chapman analyzed the results of 10,000 people who took his online quiz in 2010 and found words of affirmation was the most popular language but by a thin margin. In 2018, dating app Hinge analyzed their app and found the most common love language was quality time, by far. 

Love languages are a deceptively simple concept, and understanding them can be transformative if you put in the practical work. It invites curiosity, not mind-reading, into the relationship.

For example, you might love words of affirmation, but your partner places a premium on quality time and touch. As a bid for connection, you might text him sweet nothings all day and think you're great at expressing love; meanwhile, he might be wondering why you're never interested in spending time cuddling on the couch together at night and may actually be feeling unloved because of that. See how it's easy for disconnection and resentment to enter the picture? By determining our primary and secondary love language preferences, it can be easier to give each other what we innately crave.

Fast-forward to the present day, almost 30 years from the book's publication. As popular as the concept is, many people have since pointed out problems with the love languages. Some people can use the love languages theory as a sort of personality test, despite the fact that Chapman's whole point is that we're supposed to adapt ourselves to our partner's love language, not demand they use ours.

Indeed, recent research revealed couples being aligned with each other's love language wavelength doesn't exactly mean it makes a successful and happy relationship. Couples who shared the same love language weren't happier than the couples who had differing styles, suggesting mastering fluency over the love language system and adapting it based on what the partner needs at the moment is more valuable than solely relying on a dominant love language type. 

"It promotes codependency and prevents partners from developing autonomy and authenticity," Motamedi adds. "A relationship is a place for transformation and growth. When we limit each other with a specific love language, we do not allow room for change." 

The broad concepts, which lean on its practical simplicity, can also feel too simplistic since it's not completely inclusive of sexuality, culture, trauma, and intergenerational differences in nuanced communities. There needs to be an understanding that human relationships are a complicated reflection of their childhood wounds and attachment style, Motamedi points out: "I believe that once the person heals the wounds of their past relationships and develops a healthy attachment style, their love language also changes."